Page 27 of The Hymn to Dionysus
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If, like Dionysus, you could ask a hawk if she would lend you her eyes, and fly above Thebes, you would have seen people running away from the arena, some with their white clothes stained red, and towards the Temple of Athena.
As the arena emptied, Athena’s courtyards filled. The priestesses were confused at first, but when they understood what had happened, the sacrifice fires flared and slaves leaned into the great bellows, and as the water that ran beneath the altars boiled and steamed, the great marvels of the goddess lifted their heads, like they were waking, called to attention by the howls from the crowd. The black-plumed helms gleamed in the punishing sun, the greaves and gauntlets whispered. Sometimes, you can tell when the ghost of the god is there in the holy devices. You can feel that something immense is close by, listening.
Before you start a blood feud, you sacrifice to Athena. It’s a way to show her that you understand your duty, and that even if it takes you years to get revenge for the person who was killed, you won’t ever forget. It’s important that she knows. If you fail in that duty, she will curse you.
I did it when Helios was killed. I took Athena a black ram, and I had the name of the Trojan princess etched onto my sword to prove that however long it took me, it was destined for her. It was still there. It was what Dionysus had seen earlier: ANDROMACHE .
Hardly any of the people whose relatives had been killed were soldiers. There were young girls and old men, and nobody had a sword to swear on, but that didn’t matter. The priestesses hammered out silver bands in the furnaces where they usually repaired armour, twisted the bands into torques, and sealed them around the wrists of the survivors with Athena’s sigils—the spear and the owl. War and wisdom, strength and justice.
It took twenty of us to get the Queen out of the stadium. The road to the Palace wasn’t much better. When people saw the purple cloaks, they threw stones. The second we were on the stairway up to the High City, the watchmen slung the iron gates shut behind us. For the first four flights—within arrow-shot—the stairs were covered, and we all eased.
“What happened to them?” It was the first time there was enough quiet to ask questions instead of bark instructions. The Queen unstrapped a shield from her arm too.
“I think we can safely say that was the displeasure of a god,” said a slim older man whose name I was nearly sure was Lord Halys. I liked him distantly for reasons I couldn’t remember; I had a feeling he had been a general when I was little, and that Helios had liked him. Sometimes you inherit liking people.
“Why only the knights, why not everyone? And why not even all of the knights? Phaidros is all right, some of the others too. I saw General Alexandra, she isn’t mad.”
“Lady, we can’t guess at divine reasoning—”
“Halys, if I didn’t question what appeared to be divine reasoning, I would have been overthrown by frauds four times now.”
I couldn’t concentrate. After the howling in the stadium, the sudden quiet didn’t seem real and everything had turned strange and dreamy, and I was teetering right on the edge of one of those insane moments where I was convinced I was back at Troy. I had my shield strapped on my injured arm because I could still lift it a bit, and I couldn’t stop staring at the little picture of a tortoise etched on the inside rim. I must have seen it every day for years, but I hadn’t really been seeing it. I’d etched that on when my boy was alive, because baby knights need a gauge for how high to hold a shield and for reasons I can’t remember, tortoises are supposed to protect you against bad magic. Hold it up, remember you have to be able to see the tortoise, tiny knight ... it had just been a game. He had been too little to use an adult-sized shield, but he’d loved playing dress up with it.
Divine reasoning, had they just said?
I wanted to laugh. I wanted to say, look, of course he didn’t choose the knights. Dionysus is lightning and we’re kites.
“More pressingly,” the Guard captain said, “the knights aren’t coming back here. I saw some of them just wandering in the street, they weren’t in their right minds, and the ones who are were running away. We can’t even begin to resolve any of this until we have them back.”
By resolve, he meant execute some of them and hope it was enough to satisfy the families of the victims. There was no other way around it.
“People will think they’re here, though,” Lord Halys said. “We’re going to be under siege soon.”
If the Queen had heard them, she seemed not to have. “Captain, you and your soldiers need not make the climb. Leave your cloaks here, go the underground way, and report to the twenty largest Sown estates. Tell the ladies of each house that their children have dishonoured the garrison.”
The captain bowed briskly. “Yes lady.”
I watched him go, at a loss. Of all the things she could have used the Guards for, informing the knights’ blood relatives didn’t seem like a very important one. Maybe she thought the knights must have been going home, if they weren’t here—maybe that was right, even. I must have looked confused, because the Queen knocked me gently. On the wrong side: pain burst right up my shoulder. It was hurting in a very urgent, inconvenient way now.
“You don’t know your mother, do you?”
“No, lady.”
“Most knights are not so fortunate,” she said, and didn’t elaborate, already climbing the stairs.
I looked at Halys in case he understood what was happening, but he was grey and staring at a space of air beyond my shoulder.
Sitting like a rock in my throat was the need to tell the Queen she was wrong, it was a god, he was back in the stadium and he was doing all this in the way a cat will play-pounce on a mouse and then pretend to lose interest before shredding it.
At the top, she sent more Guards down to defend the stairway if the gates broke, and then bronzesmiths to assess whether the gates might break, and then slaves down through the same underground passages as the Guard captain, but this time to the temples. Why the temples, I couldn’t tell, and I couldn’t ask, because she was surrounded by people. I had nothing to do: none of my little knights were here. Hardly any knights at all. The few red cloaks I could see belonged to people who hadn’t been at the stadium. They’d drawn the short straw for guard duty at the garrison here, and everyone looked confused and worried. I asked one of the officers of the Guards if there was anything I could do to help, but he only snapped that I could sit still and try not to murder anyone important.
So I sat still, shield propped against one knee, on the wall that blocked off the sheer drop down to the lower city. On this side, it was about a hundred feet. People were swarming around the gate, yelling, and hammering on the bronze: it wouldn’t be long before someone organised enough of them to get a battering ram. On the other side, where there were no stairs, it was a rocky and jagged slope. Only mountain goats made the climb there. A rank of Guards stood at that wall anyway, in case anyone tried. Maybe they would, because since I’d last looked at it properly, it was tangled with ivy.
I’d never been on the inside of a siege before. It was difficult not to think of those people I’d used to see on the high balconies at the palace in Troy, and how much I’d hated them for having an inside to go to, and food, and baths.
Beyond the heaving crowd at the gates, I could see down into the streets. There was some looting—unless those boys were running with sacks of flour just for the exercise—and up where the night market would be later, something was on fire. Every so often, there was a flash of red that might have been a cloak, but I never caught it for long before the knight disappeared under their own mob.
“Heliades,” the Queen’s voice said right behind me.
I stood up fast.
“Why didn’t it happen to you? Why are you different?”
I pressed my teeth together against a thirty-year instinct to report exactly what had happened. My friend wasn’t an ordinary person; he had snapped, just for a second, because anyone would lose their temper with Jason. And I hadn’t turned because I’d wronged him badly long ago, and he was saving me until the end.
“I don’t know why, lady.”
It was the first outright lie I’d told to anyone in seniority since I’d taken my vow. I wanted to scrub my skin off.
She shook her head once, then paused. “You’re hurt.”
“I’ve already seen a witch.”
Dionysus was still down there somewhere. I was probably never going to see him again.
“And you’re not ... drunk,” she said gradually.
I blinked twice, wishing I could say, This is an astonishingly irrelevant thing to be asking me about when either we’re all about to die, or a lot of other people are. Of course I couldn’t say that. Even if she had asked me what I thought about the courtship habits of red badgers, I couldn’t have said it. “I’m never drunk, lady.”
“It’s a festival day, you didn’t want to relax?”
“I had half a cup of wine but then all this ...”
“Half a cup,” she said thoughtfully.
“Lady?” I asked, desperate for her to say something that would explain why she seemed not to mind about the raging crowd, why she’d sent the Guard captain to the Sown estates, what anyone’s mother had to do with anything. The first rule of the legion is that you trust the orders of your commanding officer even if they seem openly crazy, but it had been a long time since I’d had a commanding officer whose reasoning I couldn’t follow.
She studied me for another second. Despite everything, and despite how everyone else in the courtyards was drawn and grey and anxious, she had a glow: she was full of energy, exactly like Helios right before a battle. It was that zing that great knights get right before they’re finally allowed, after weeks and weeks of paralysingly boring night watches and drills and being forced to care about stock-takes and ship maintenance, to prove that they are great.
I don’t know what I thought she was going to say, but it wasn’t what she did say.
“Have you ever seen inside the mechanisms of a holy marvel?”
I baulked, because that was really asking me whether I’d committed sacrilege. “No!”
“Come with me.”
On the roof the Palace is a great marvel of Apollo: lord of all Thebes, of marvels, of order and logic and everything we are. It’s about the size of the Herakles marvel at the Amber Gate, but you wouldn’t know, because the roof is high enough that it looks like it could be the size of a human. I’d always thought it was a statue, not a working marvel, because I’d never seen it move, and I’d never known that you could even get up to it. You could, though. Behind the throne, leading up from that complicated chamber full of the mechanisms that made the dragons run, there was a stairway. It was a narrow helix that coiled up inside the old watchtower, and at the top, a low door led outside, and a thin flat path went along the runnel of the roof to the feet of the marvel.
Covered by a roof but open to the air, except for its four posts, was a kind of cabin. Inside was machinery. There was a heavy lever, and something complicated that connected to the marvel, something like a flue.
“Only the royal family know what this is, and how it works,” the Queen told me. She leaned hard into the lever, which ground forward. Somewhere below us, steam surged and rattled, powering upwards through the pipes to the marvel. I stared up at it. I’d never been so close to one this big before. There was a hatch in the back of the left ankle that was big enough for a slim person to climb into. I had to fight the need to back away. Not because it was intimidating, though it was, but because I shouldn’t have been close enough to start guessing how it worked. That was sacred.
“Can he move?” I asked, thinking of all this gigantic weight of bronze right on the Palace roof.
“No. But he can speak. That’s what you’re going to do.” She held her arm out to make me come closer, and showed me the flue. “You’re going to speak into that. It will make him speak too.”
When you were younger, as a prank, did anyone ever do that trick where they put their fist on top of your head and smack it with their other hand, and then drag it down your neck to make it feel like they’ve broken an egg, and it’s slimily realistic and then because you were an irritating little prick, you immediately did it to all your other friends too? I felt like that. I felt like she’d done the egg trick—not just that she’d broken something nasty on me, but that it was inappropriate, a kind of stupid, childish prank close to this great thing that was holy. I waited for her to laugh and say, Ha, not really, of course you can’t make Apollo talk, that’s silly, nobody knows the real magic inside marvels . She didn’t.
“What you’re going to say, when I tell you, is: ‘This is not the work of a god, but a man, and poisoned wine. Justice is in the hands of the daughters of the dragon.’ ”
“Poisoned ... wine.”
“Yes.”
“This is—lady, this is sacrilege, you can’t just make a god say whatever you want—”
“Phaidros,” she interrupted, almost laughing. “I’m not making Apollo say it. I’m making a machine say it.”
“A holy device,” I said, appalled. “I can’t—”
“This is how they work,” she said over me. “This is how they all work. There’s no magic in marvels. Apollo doesn’t care what you make a machine say. I need you to say this, it needs to be a man’s voice, and it can only be a member of the House of Kadmus. You’re family, Phaidros.”
I was suspended in honey again. Drowning, but in something sweet. I’d never felt like that before this week, no one had ever made me feel like that, and now two of them had come along at once.
I must have looked like I was about to hurl myself off the roof, because she slowed down and came back to me, although she had been on her way to the edge to see out over the city.
“I know it’s hard to hear,” she said, more gently—but not, I thought, like she really did know. More like she knew that it was the best thing to say in order to make me gut up and do as I was told. “I know. It’s reassuring to think the gods are with us in holy machines, but they’re not. It’s just priests and oracles. And sometimes, desperate queens and kings who need to find a way to bring order back to a city that’s eating itself.”
I couldn’t tell what it was in me that was breaking, but something was. The way I understood the world, and Thebes, and everything in it—it was too big to have a name.
“Tell me what you have to say, knight.”
I swallowed it all down. “This is not the work of a god, but a man, and poisoned wine. Justice is in the hands of the daughters of the dragon.”
“Good. Stand here.” She looked up at the marvel, leaning back to see the heights of it against the sun. “It’s almost ready.” She was right: the steam was singing inside. She went to the edge of the roof, saw something that made her smile, and knocked her fists together. That zing she’d had before in the courtyard was even stronger now. She was Helios on the front line, waiting for the advance order: it was pure joy. I’d thought it was deinos enough in him, because even among knights, it’s rare to genuinely love battle once you understand what it is. I only have it sometimes. To feel the joy of war in the face of not just a chariot line coming at you, which is straightforward, but an entire city howling at the edge of uprising—that was something else. “They’re here.”
I went to the edge too.
At the hem of the crowd now, there was a red band. I couldn’t work out what I was seeing at first. Not serving knights.
They were women, all of them, Sown ladies dressed in ceremony red. Every one of them, and there must have been about a hundred, had come on a war chariot, with a full team of horses, and with younger girls behind them to serve as the squires—just like in the story, where Hera and her daughters got Athena’s chariot ready. They had surrounded the crowd without trapping them: there was enough room between the chariots to run past. Each chariot glittered with the combat lineage crests of each family; each of the women would have once been a serving knight, before marriage. From up here, I couldn’t make them out, but I could see the blinding shine off the bronze and the filigree. The horses, bred from the same lines as the garrison’s chargers, were bad-tempered in the heat and the crowd, snapping at anyone who came up too close to them. A weird, uneasy murmur went through everyone.
The Queen gave me a look of absolute delight, and shoved another lever in the marvel, hard.
A noise like I had never heard before tore right across the city. It was like a battle horn, but it was so much louder than any horn. I had to smack both hands over my ears. It shook the roof under us, and vibrated in the bronze of the marvel. If someone had told me that it was the signal that sounded when Athena and Ares rode out from Olympus, I would have believed it.
The crowd turned, looking up at us, and the Palace, and the great marvel.
The Queen put me in front of the flue, close, so I was breathing into it. Even that tiny sound echoed impossibly, so loud I was sure people down in the streets could hear it. She grasped my shoulders to keep me in the right place.
It was sacrilege, but it was an order from the Queen, and duty is honour.
Duty is honour.
“ This is not the work of a god, but a man, and poisoned wine. Justice is in the hands of the daughters of the dragon .”
Some device inside the marvel took my voice and changed it into thunder that crashed over the whole of Thebes.
The Queen tapped me and pressed her finger over her lips, and then, still full of joy, mimed giving me a round of applause. She pulled me to the edge of the roof, pressing my shoulder to keep me low. We both knelt down at the edge to see into the crowd below, where the angry chants and shouting had gone silent. I had to push my fist against my heart, because my ribcage had gone stiff with the knowledge that—just like when Dionysus had lifted me up and I’d lost sight of why I shouldn’t dance—I’d crossed an invisible border, and there was no true going back. Only with Dionysus, it had been a relief, in an unholy kind of way. This was just unholy, and what was leaning its boot right into my chest was the opposite of relief. Pressure, that felt like it would be rib-breaking soon.
The Sown mothers, a good two feet above the ground where they were mounted on the chariots, all held up something. They had one or sometimes two each, small things, the size of an oil jug or a head, and it took me entire seconds to understand that the things weren’t just the size of heads. They were heads.
I forgot everything about the marvel and sacrilege and the Queen and Dionysus. Jason’s mother was down there. I recognised her, she was my age, we had been in the same unit, but she had gone home to Thebes to marry before the ship was wrecked. The head she was holding was Jason’s.
When they spoke, they all spoke together, and it clear even from the roof.
“Pardon us for the dishonour our children have brought to you, citizens of Thebes, and pray that we shall give you better knights in the years to come.”
If I was shocked, the crowd was stunned. Nobody moved. Nobody said a word.
The Sown ladies climbed down from the chariots and picked up baskets. The baskets were full of gold and silver, the spoils of war from Troy—not money, but plates and chalices and jewellery. They began to hand it out to everyone in the crowd. On any other day, they would surely have been mobbed, but everyone was broken-marvel still, and the red figures moved through in peace, trailed by their younger children, who had brought water, or wine.
And then people just ... began to leave. It began at the edges of the crowd. It effervesced, and people misted away into the alleys and the squares, moving slowly, without any of the rage from before. The faces I could make out looked numb, or confused, or sometimes relieved. One man was sitting on the ground, staring at a severed head as if he were trying to work out what he was supposed to do now.
“You didn’t know why the Theban legion is called the Furies, did you?” the Queen said.
In the top of my mind, I’d thought it was just because we were fierce. But somewhere in the deep under-strata, I did know. People had told stories around campfires about what happened if Theban knights tried to desert, or worse, if they killed a Theban civilian. I’d thought they were just trying to scare the children. The Furies—the real Furies, from the holy stories—come for any truly unjust murder.
Down in the crowd, people began to sing. It was the hymn to Athena; the thanksgiving for justice.
The Queen patted my back and I followed her to the stairs, down through the tower—all the way down, the hymn swelled, even though the walls—and then out past the throne, onto the balcony that looked out over Thebes, and over the singing crowd. Her chamberlain was waiting, with the Marvel Crown. The Queen lifted it from its velvet cushion in passing and paused while slaves fitted the royal silver armour over her clothes.
“Borrow your sword?” she said to me as she came into view of the crowd.
I gave it to her.
She unsheathed it and held it up high, and there in the sun and the burning sky she looked like Athena, and the crowd exploded. I twitched, because for a split second I thought they were about to surge at the gates and start firing poisoned arrows at her, but I was wrong. It wasn’t rage. They were cheering.